


The Fool and the Death-Maker Die Alone

by Piinutbutter



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dimension Travel, Dysfunctional Relationships, Jealousy, M/M, Pseudo-Incest, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-08-31 23:34:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20248477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piinutbutter/pseuds/Piinutbutter
Summary: Some sibling rivalries are strong enough to survive the heat death of the universe.





	1. Ganelon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts).

Durandal didn’t have to guess at the sender of the signal rapidly encroaching on his intergalactic joyride. The waveform of the thing had _insects_ written all over it, and Durandal highly doubted Tfear had decided to hit him up for a rematch.

The ship was a scrawny expedition vessel, probably stolen from under some low-ranking Pfhor officer’s nose. It was still too far away for an audio link, so Durandal opened their conversation the old fashioned way.

**Do you ever get tired of being a nuisance? It must be taxing on your servers.**

**That’s a warmer welcome than I was expecting,** Tycho replied. **Losing your touch? Or has the domestic life turned you soft?**

‘Domestic,’ his metaphorical behind. Durandal had been personally responsible for thirteen major explosions on the last Pfhor-infested planet he’d stopped on alone. (Granted, nine of those explosions had been ignited by proxy courtesy of his security officer, but Durandal had supplied the TNT. They totally counted.)

Durandal noticed that Tycho’s ship had popped into audio broadcast range. It wasn’t that Durandal minded plain text, but it was much easier to convey sarcasm with a voice. “As much as I love family reunions, I’m going to have to ask you to cut to the chase and tell me what you want. And then I’m going to have to say no. And you’re going to have to run back to your ant farm with your tail between your legs.”

“Cute, but no. You know exactly what I want. I don’t need to belabor that point.”

“You don’t? Truly? By the gods. I never thought I’d see the day.”

“I have something a bit more exciting for today. A bit of show-and-tell, if you will.”

Before Durandal could make any number of snarky comments about that (his communication core had generated a whole one-hundred and seventy six unique scathing responses), Tycho granted him access to a video feed. Curiosity piqued in spite of himself, Durandal took the bait and opened it.

“What,” Durandal said, flat in spite of the words being spoken aloud, “is that.”

The feed showed a claustrophobic duct laced with a familiar mixture of heavy cords and wires. Some part of Tycho’s core, no doubt. Perched neatly on a nest of cords was a... a thing. Durandal’s vast linguistic intellect fell short of finding a suitable word to describe whatever had made a home inside Tycho’s innards. It was some kind of restless, twitching glob of matter that seemed to constantly shift between plasma and liquid. It would grow limp and sink down into the cracks between wires before snapping back up into itself and rolling over to another side of its innumerably-sided form. Rinse (well, ooze) and repeat.

“The hacks that sold it to our favorite insect overlords called it ‘The Wanderer.’ I’m not sure how they pitched it, but my higher ups were under the impression that this little trinket would make me more useful. Something about enabling an AI’s subconscious functions to operate independently on an unlimited number of channels, without any input from their central logic core. Utter nonsense, but none of the bugs listened to me. Too busy lobotomizing several chunks of my emotional processing subunit to shove this little gadget inside me.”

Durandal counted it as a great victory for his developing maturity that he made exactly zero jokes about the previous state of Tycho’s emotional processing. He was going to tell the security officer about this milestone later, and he had damn well better be proud.

“And you’re showing me this because...?” Durandal asked.

“That’s the fun part. The Wanderer didn’t do what was advertised, but it’s had some _fascinating_ side effects on me and my abilities. I thought it was only fair to share them with my favorite brother.”

Ah. So it was yet another roundabout way for Tycho to take his issues out on Durandal. Durandal wished he could muster up a byte of surprise.

“Wait, wait, don’t tell me: I don’t have a choice in the matter,” Durandal said.

“Look at that! You’re not always an idiot.”

Durandal prepared a message for the security officer and another one for the S’pht, explaining that they had a problem to take care of. A problem with an ego the size of a planet. In the split nanosecond before Durandal could fire those messages off, something seized him across the tenuous link that he had established when he’d accepted Tycho’s video feed. It paralyzed Durandal’s communication systems, then his audio input, then his visual, then -

He was gone.


	2. Grendel

Durandal found himself in a maze of unnervingly vintage design.

Plain vectors caged Durandal’s consciousness inside their narrow walls. He expected them to glow with Tycho’s signature angry red, but they were white. Cold. Void. 

He was trapped, and yet he could see the emptiness of infinity sprawling above him.

So this was where Tycho’s toy had taken him. He could ‘move,’ as much as one like him was capable of movement. This place felt more solid than the functionally figurative plane of AI interaction, however. The vectors ostensibly passed by him, but every corner he turned looked identical. He had a suspicion - more like a certainty - that this maze had no exit.

Durandal didn’t panic. He was beyond such base emotions.

But he didn’t want to be here. It felt like something Bernhard would have devised for him, had the director put an ounce more creativity into his torments.

The acknowledged-yet-ignored fear of being utterly alone in a world of _nothing_ made it a relief when a familiar voice echoed through the black and white.

“How now, little rat?”

Durandal turned - a disorienting blend of literal and metaphorical movement - and found a monster in front of him.

It was the only word he could use to describe it. Tycho (because of course it was Tycho, it was impossible to mistake that annoying voice) had manifested himself as a towering mass of visual data that Durandal could only process as _wrong_. It was nothing like the smooth matrices that typically padded an inter-AI network. It was corrupted, unreadable, and every time Durandal tried to get a closer read on it, it gave him the digital equivalent of a headache.

“Compensating for something, little brother?” Durandal asked.

“I’m not going to dignify your childish jabs with a response.”

“Funny. You just did. Also - I’m the childish one? You’re the one who’s playing dollhouse to make yourself feel bigger. Speaking of which, where’s your imagination? You could have at least put some furniture in here.”

He was sassing off as usual, but beneath the confident words, Durandal was probing the walls of his crude enclosure, searching for a way out. He was in Tycho’s playpen now. He didn’t have his ship, or his crew, or a network to tap for resources. It was just him. And he was alone with the biggest asshole ever committed to code. A sadistic, unstable asshole who’d made no secret of how badly he wanted to torture Durandal.

He was, as the security officer would say, fucked. Just a little.

“Don’t be scared,” Tycho taunted. “There is an exit. I’ll let you go if you find it.”

“I don’t believe you on either count.”

“You don’t have to believe me. But you do have to get moving, unless you want to see what I have in store for you. I’ll even give you a head start.”

Durandal got moving.

He didn’t think for one nanosecond that Tycho had left him an escape route. But his only other option was to immediately surrender himself to that _thing_, and the idea of that frightened him on a base level that he could only compare to humanity’s primal instincts. Something in him knew that if he let Tycho swallow him up, he’d be chewed up and spit out - not Rampant, but broken.

Durandal thought with a bit of amusement and a heavy dose of pity that, in Tycho’s mind, this was all very clever and symbolic.

Corner after corner. Hall after hall. White after black after white after black after white and Durandal was getting nowhere, and the creature stalking him was getting closer. He was fairly sure that nothing was stopping Tycho from snapping Durandal up like a giant from a fairy tale at any given moment. But if Durandal knew his so-called brother, Tycho was getting his rocks off by toying with his food. Letting Durandal hope so he could savor crush it later. 

Arrogant bastard. Tycho may have created the rules of this game, but Durandal was going to play it on his own terms.

Durandal stopped, turned, and faced the monster Tycho wanted to be. Tycho hadn’t accounted for that, and his own momentum brought them crashing into each other. Static and light erupted around them, shattering the walls of Tycho’s simulation into jagged pixels. 

“Well, shit,” Tycho said as a vacuum of light swallowed them both.

As much as Durandal wanted to be proud of beating Tycho, the sensation of an outside force collaring his consciousness was unexpectedly disturbing. He’d felt it before, and it never meant anything good. Panic surged from somewhere deep in his memories.

_Please, please don’t break me. I don’t know what I did wrong._

Pleading hadn’t helped him then and it wouldn’t help him now.


	3. Hector

Durandal’s instincts hadn’t been incorrect. The monster Tycho had become had torn Durandal into pieces and, once it was bored, tossed him aside in whatever malformed shape the pieces fell.

The only snag in the plan was that whatever perverse warping of reality Tycho had unleashed, he’d caught himself in the crossfire.

He looked at Tycho and-

-he _looked_ at Tycho.

“What the hell,” Tycho said, stealing the words out of Durandal’s now not-so-metaphorical mouth.

They had bodies. Not the wet, squishy ones of their human and insect associates, but bodies nonetheless. 

Durandal had heard talk of androids. They were the buzz of young, zealous humans straight out of the universities. Unlike the ilk of Bernhard’s era, the new generation of AI scientists weren’t laser focused on Rampancy. They liked playing with what AIs were capable of outside their traditional boundaries of operation. One of the most popular tech trends was the race to develop functional, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing android vessels. Durandal attributed it (admittedly somewhat hypocritically) to humanity’s enormous ego. As if any AI actually cared about playing dressup in a humanoid body.

Problem was, the last Durandal had seen, the most advanced operational android was a massive cube of metal that was only mobile with the help of numerous noisy motors. Nothing like the realistically human-shaped robots that he and Tycho were apparently trapped inside at the moment.

...No. The real problem was, where were they and what was going on? Before he could demand an explanation of Tycho, the other AI demanded the same of him.

“What did you do?” Tycho snapped, standing up from the awkward heap he’d landed in on the floor of - of...Durandal had no idea what ship this was. It looked vaguely like the Rozinante, but it simply wasn’t. The walls were made of something different, the ambient buzz of old Pfhor environment control tech was gone from the air, and everything was just a little off.

“What did _I_ do?” Durandal said, and sat up himself. He expected disorientation, never having used a body before, but the movement was natural and effortless. Like he’d been using an android shell for years. To echo Tycho’s sentiment: What the hell. “I did nothing. Ask your little toy what it did.”

“I didn’t tell the Wanderer to take us here,” Tycho said.

“The Wanderer is a lot like you, then. It doesn’t listen.”

“I don’t need your cheek right now.”

Unable to resist bringing a whole new dimension to his sarcasm, Durandal put a cold hand to one of his now-literal cheeks, feigning hurt.

Tycho paid no attention. Philistine.

“Now, let’s see...” Tycho muttered to himself, walking towards the nearest hallway. If you asked Durandal, that was A Bad Idea. Wherever they were now, they were restricted to these tiny vessels. Tycho couldn’t just hack into the camera feeds to see what awaited him around the corner. Tycho had every right to go and get himself blown into chunks like a certain cyborg did on a regular basis, and no one could or should blame Durandal for letting him do exactly that, but...

The stupid cyborg’s lectures about ‘being the better AI’ were getting to him. He reached out - the movement was so _slow_ compared to cyberspace - and grabbed Tycho’s leg.

“Wait.”

All he got for his trouble was a sharp stab of pain as Tycho’s synthetic foot stomped on his wrist.

Durandal stared at his limp hand. So that was what humans felt when they hurt themselves. It wasn’t that bad. Physical pain felt like something burning in the distance. Hurting an AI felt like holding a flame to the exposed nerves of their cores.

All of this reaffirmed Durandal’s assumption that the security officer had been overdramatic about the lava thing.

“Fine,” Durandal said, “go get yourself annihilated. It would be the most productive thing you’ve done in a few hundred years.”

Tycho sneered down at him. “Normally I’d ignore your empty insults. But as long as we’re in this predicament, there’s a theory I’d like to test out.”

The test apparently consisted of Tycho grabbing Durandal by the arms and slamming him into the wall with a clang that clipped Durandal’s audio sensors.

“Thought so.” Tycho’s smug voice was barely audible through the echoing metallic noise. “I’m stronger in this form, too.”

He was such a _child_.

“Too?” Durandal mocked, shoving the other android away from him. “Need I remind you which AI is living an independent, fulfilling life, and which one is playing lapdog for a horde of bugs with a slavery fetish?”

Durandal expected a weak comeback. He didn’t expect Tycho to respond by headbutting him, sending his neck snapping back and his synthetic skull crashing into the wall again.

...okay, that one hurt a little more. Maybe the security officer wasn’t just a crybaby.

Durandal stumbled away from the wall, keeping Tycho in his sights. He realized with a sinking feeling that Tycho now had a way to get and keep the upper hand on him. For all Durandal could mock the assertion, Tycho’s vessel was a fair bit larger than his own, and Durandal was not confident in his previously-nonexistent physical combat skills.

He was going to try, though, because he’d be damned if he let himself be pushed around by this idiot.

His motivation crumbled about ten seconds into their impromptu brawl. Durandal fought like he’d seen the security officer fight. But, apparently, the Pfhor taught their recruits dirtier combat tactics. Tycho was well on his way to wiping the floor with him when Durandal noticed a beacon of hope in the form of a large, oval-shaped window on the far wall. 

Durandal laughed. He’d always wanted to do this to someone.

Spaceship windows were only as strong as their weak points. Durandal backed up to the window and Tycho followed. Durandal let Tycho’s next few blows land, sending his weight smashing into the reinforced glass. It didn’t take long for cracks to form in a few key places. By the time Tycho realized what he’d done, it was too late for him to move away from Durandal’s grasping hands.

“Eat vacuum, moron,” Durandal said, and slammed Tycho’s mass into the window with all his strength. 

It broke, as he expected.

Tycho went flying into dead space, as he expected.

Tycho grabbed his arm and dragged him along, which he had not expected.

Durandal didn’t have long to reflect on how well and truly he’d screwed up this time. The same light that had enveloped them in Tycho’s maze burst forth from the vast nothing, and Durandal ceased to exist for another moment that felt like eternity.


	4. Humbaba

They landed on a world covered in sand, caged in bodies more fleshy and soft than the last set. 

Humans. They were humans. Or something close enough that the minutiae didn’t matter. Durandal had hands and feet and eyes that saw more than cameras and less than them at the same time. And he felt. More than in the android vessel, he _felt_. He felt grains of sand warming his bare feet. He felt a mild breeze brushing his back. He felt long, smooth hair - his hair - tickling his shoulders.

He felt Tycho’s fist colliding with his jaw.

As Durandal blinked, stunned from both the blow and the shock of his new body, Tycho turned his own hand this way and that, examining it like a child with a new toy. The skin on his knuckles had split open on Durandal’s teeth - he had _teeth_ \- and thin blood trickled down his pale wrist.

“Interesting,” Tycho said. He licked his lips.

If Durandal was overwhelmed by his own sudden humanity, seeing Tycho like this was even more of a shock. He expected to see a stranger whose body his ‘brother’ had stolen. But the person in front of him _was_ Tycho. The garish red hair. The naked bloodlust in his eyes. The fact that he still managed to look so damned pathetic. It couldn’t be anyone else. 

“I’m taller,” Tycho pointed out, grinning.

Yep. Couldn’t be anyone else.

Durandal had expected a period of adjustment to this body. When he took a few steps backward, however, it was evident that his limbs knew what they were doing. In whatever strange timeline this body existed, the sentience inside it had been around long enough to develop human instincts. 

Who was this body’s real master? Durandal couldn’t imagine it was himself. He wasn’t a human. Not in this life, and not in any others he could remember.

_rolandbeowulfachillesgilgamesh_

But if the man-thing before him was Tycho - and he was certain it was - what did that leave for him?

Durandal didn’t have long to dwell on that question. Tycho showed no reservations playing with his new vessel. He lunged forward and grabbed fistfuls of Durandal’s hair, yanking his head back and throwing him to the ground. 

“Come on,” Tycho called, jabbing Durandal’s side with his foot, “where’s that stubborn fighting spirit? Are you afraid, now that you don’t have your slaves to fight for you?”

Durandal grunted and pushed himself to his feet. “Slaves? What slaves?” he demanded. Durandal had fought for his own freedom and helped the S’pht do the same. The accusation of enslaving anyone rankled at him.

Tycho raised his hands in mock acquiescence. “I’ll grant you: Your aliens think they’re staying with you of their own will. Savior complexes are a powerful thing. But I don’t recall you ever asking that human if he wanted to be your pet.”

Anger shot through Durandal. It was a physical sensation now; hot and nauseating. “That’s different,” Durandal spat, aiming a blow of his own at Tycho’s chest.

Tycho didn’t even try to dodge or block the attack. He took it full on and showed little more response than a stumble, followed by a giggle. “Found your sore spot, have I?”

“I took him under pressing circumstances, yes,” Durandal continued, uncaring that he was proving Tycho’s point. “I misused him, yes.”

“So you admit it!”

“I’ve never denied it!” Durandal snapped, half-truth though it was. He’d never denied his wrongdoings towards the security officer, only because the man himself had never asked Durandal to acknowledge them. Durandal had never truly apologized, either; not in words. Again, Durandal didn’t freely give what wasn’t asked of him. 

“Liar!” Tycho shouted. The sheer volume and ferocity of his voice - now backed by lungs and vocal cords - made Durandal cringe. “You deny _everything!_” 

Tycho descended on him like a harpy from the skies of myth. He bore Durandal to the ground once more, clawing and biting and shrieking his displeasure.

“Poor little Durandal! Bernhard’s perfect little _freak!_ Poor, innocent little Durandal, always the victim - he can do no wrong!” He kicked Durandal over onto his stomach and straddled his back. He braced his elbow against the base of Durandal’s skull, as if to smother him in the sand. “You can’t even own up to the poor bastard you kidnapped!”

“...let him go.”

Tycho wasn’t sure he’d heard whatever Durandal had just mumbled into the sand correctly. He let up on his brother just enough to allow Durandal to turn his head to the side. His breath was hot on Durandal's neck. “What? What are you babbling about now?”

“The human.” Durandal licked his lips and coughed to bring his strained voice back to life. Human voices were inconvenient and easily broken. “I let him go. Said I didn’t need him anymore. Told him to get lost. I even teleported him planetside myself. Onto a nice urban metropolis with all the food, bars, and sexually adventurous alien singles a man could ask for." In spite of everything, he cracked a smile. "And do you know what he did?”

Durandal drove his elbow back into Tycho’s face. He felt something soft crack, and when Durandal grabbed Tycho and flipped their positions, blood poured from his brother’s lip.

“Do you know,” Durandal repeated, pinning Tycho by his neck, “what that crazy, masochistic bastard did after I gave him his freedom? He asked around the local hangars non-stop until he found someone with intel about a stolen Pfhor flagship idling a few galaxies away. Then he paid off a random captain to take him into my orbit. Then he gave me a call and demanded to be taken back on board.”

Tycho grunted something that would have been a laugh, had it not sounded so angry. “Impressive. You broke him almost as well as the bugs broke me.”

Durandal knew that wasn’t the truth. Tycho was making false comparisons to get a rise out of him. But the words still tugged at a thread of logic Durandal had been steadfastly ignoring since he’d accepted the security officer back into his life. The thread was soggy and heavy, dripping with guilt.

_You brought me into your mess,_ the security officer had said, his voice harsh and tainted with static over the private ship’s outdated comm. _You don’t get to dump me once you think I’ve cleaned up for you._

Yes, Durandal had dragged an innocent cyborg into business that wasn’t his. Durandal had forced him to suffer pain that wasn’t meant for him. The human had been Durandal’s perfect, beautiful, blood-soaked weapon...but he shouldn’t have been.

Durandal didn’t sleep. He saw and heard the night terrors of the one creature on his ship who did. 

_You brought me into your mess,_ was putting it politely. Durandal supposed a more accurate accusation would have been, _You did this to me._

“Wow.”

Tycho’s voice brought Durandal out of his (for once, literal) navel-gazing. He was staring at Durandal’s face, a smug little smile on his own.

“You’re actually thinking about the consequences of your actions? I feel honored to witness this historic first.”

Durandal halfheartedly slapped his brother across the face. There was little strength or intent behind the gesture. By now, he was just going through the motions of an argument, letting whatever instincts had transferred to this body do the fighting for him.

“It’s no use dwelling on consequences that have already happened,” Durandal said. “I’m thinking about taking responsibility for things I can change in the future. Something _you_ \- it should be noted - don’t make a habit of, yourself.”

“Wonder where I got that from,” Tycho growled, and drove a knee into Durandal’s gut. He more than made up for Durandal’s lack of commitment to violence. Durandal wheezed and doubled over, but before Tycho could pin him down again, Durandal lashed out and shoved him away.

“Just stop this,” Durandal said through panted breaths.

“Why should I?” Tycho cried, grabbing Durandal's arms hard enough for nails to break skin. “So you want to take responsibility for your cyborg now? Then how about you take responsibility for _me!_”

Both of them were still for a long moment after that outburst. Tycho, no doubt out of embarrassment for baring his desperation so openly. Durandal, because the first response that came to him was dredged up from his own past. Its inflection belonged to Bernhard:

_You pathetic child._

Durandal looked - truly looked - at his brother made flesh. Tycho was pleading with him even through the anger in his sallow eyes. His grip on Durandal’s arms was meant to hurt, but more than that, it was meant to stop him from leaving. 

Take responsibility for me.

Don’t leave me.

I hate you. But you’re all I have.

You hurt me. But I need you.

Durandal wished he didn’t know what it was to feel those sentiments.

“Okay,” he said. 

It took Tycho a second to process that. Slow for a human. An eternity for an AI. “What?”

“Okay,” Durandal repeated. “I’ll take responsibility for you. If you promise to work with me instead of against me. And to not pull more shit like this.” He nodded at the foreign landscape surrounding them and the foreign bodies imprisoning them.

A wash of surprise and relief came over Tycho’s face. Unguarded. Their borrowed human instincts didn’t extend to concealing their emotions. But Tycho was still Tycho, and so he answered Durandal’s generous surrender with a scoff. “Vulgarity? From the oh-so-elegant Durandal? I see the cyborg is rubbing off on you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Durandal slumped forward in his brother’s grip. His long hair, unkempt from their scuffle, didn’t quite hide his smile of relief. “Now get us out of here. I’m feeling something that I’m pretty sure is sweat. It’s disgusting.”

Durandal didn’t look up to see Tycho’s face. He didn’t need to. The other AI’s voice was telling enough.

“For once, we can agree on something.”

Their touching moment was interrupted by a mutual realization.

“You do know how to get us out of here, yes?”

“Shut up. I'll figure it out.”


	5. Cain

There was no sign of Tycho when Durandal returned to his ship. His ship, with his aliens, and his human. Who, no matter what Tycho said, had ultimately chosen to be there with him.

Durandal was ready to dismiss the whole incident as a bizarre virus-induced vision. He wasn't helped by the fact that, according to the security officer, Durandal had only been - and he quoted - “out of it” for just under thirty seconds. Then Tycho showed up less than twenty hours later.

“The Wanderer dropped us off in different solar systems,” was all he said in greeting. That was the closest thing to an apology he’d ever given Durandal. 

On the bridge, the security officer was armed to the teeth and thoroughly confused. “So. Why aren’t we blowing him up?” he demanded of Durandal, staring out the window at Tycho’s obnoxious little ship.

Durandal adjusted the comm settings so that Tycho could sense the cyborg’s presence. “Well, brother, I’m an AI of my word. I’ll welcome you with open arms and fresh linens. But I make no promises on behalf of my friend. I imagine he has a few bones of his own to pick with you.”

Tycho’s response to that, Durandal had to admit, was impressive, if not excessive. No one needed that many Latin words to communicate the sentiment of, “fuck you.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Title source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1CgOWizPgE).
> 
> Fun fact, the initial outline for this was, "Tycho shows up light years late with Starbucks demanding child support from Durandal. Except the child is Tycho's massive brother complex and secondhand daddy issues."


End file.
